Meet the Sheepsquatch

It's not every day that a new cryptid comes to the attention of the media. Recently, though, a strange creature called the "sheepsquatch" has been sighted in West Virginia. The creature supposedly looks about like you would imagine from the name, half-bigfoot and half-sheep, which just goes to show that apparently bigfoot DNA can mix with something else besides possum. It's not precisely a horror, though - sheepsquatch is big and scary looking, but essentially timid. According to reports, its usual response to a human encounter is to simply run away.

Sheepsquatch, also known as "the white thing", is a woolly-haired cryptid reported across numerous counties in West Virginia, predominantly within the southwestern region of the state. Those counties with the most sightings are Boone, Kanawha, Putnam and Mason, with a surge in sightings taking place in Boone County during the mid-1990s. It is described as being a quadruped about the size of a bear, with entirely white wool-like fur. It has a long and pointed head, similar to a dog but with long, saber-like teeth and a single-pint set of horns not dissimilar from those found on a young goat. Its forelimbs end in paw-like hands, similar to those of a raccoon but larger, while its tail is long and hairless like that of an opossum. It is reputed to smell like sulfur, which has been attributed through folklore to the beast being born within the TNT area in Mason County, though this is not likely and instead may be a musk scent gland similar to those found in many species in the order Carnivora such as weasels and skunks.

So, more seriously, could this be a real animal? If so, it might constitute a legitimate discovery. Most witnesses describe the sheepsquatch as about the size and shape of a bear with a white coat, and it so happens that such an animal does exist - just not to our knowledge in West Virginia. That animal is the Kermode or spirit bear, a subspecies of American black bear native to British Columbia.

How Not to Walk on Water

Gabonese pastor Franck Kabele believed that he could perform the same miracles as Jesus. So much so, in fact, that in an impressive but tragic display of faith he drowned attempting to cross the Kombo estuary on foot. While I give him credit for conducting such a brazen test of his miraculous abilities, it seems to me that he probably should have tried it out on a smaller and less dangerous body of water first.

Pastor Franck Kabele, 35, told his congregation that he was capable of reenacting the very miracles of Jesus Christ. He decided to make it clear through way of demonstration on Gabon’s beach in the capital city of Libreville.

Referencing Matthew 14:22-33, Kabele said that he received a revelation which told him that with enough faith he could achieve what Jesus was able to.

According to an eyewitness, Kabele took his congregation out to the beach. He told them that he would cross the Kombo estuary by foot, which is normally a 20 minute boat ride.

Sadly by the second step into the water Kabele found himself completely submerged. He never returned.

There's nothing wrong with putting paranormal powers to the test. I do with my magical operations all the time. But I also know that since such things don't always work, setting up a test that requires me to stake my life on them is simply a bad idea. On of the more dangerous ideas that comes out of the "faith based" model of magick or miracles or whatever you want to call them is the concept that taking reasonable precautions somehow undermines faith. The same problem happens with faith healing when healers insist that for their methods to work their patients must forego regular medical care.

The magick that's most effective is a both/and discipline. Set up all the tests you want, but make sure you also engage in whatever mundane actions are necessary to prevent disasters like this one and ensure success.

UPDATE: A recent article on Patheos now contends that this story is a hoax. It certainly might be; in some African countries the local news can be wildly inaccurate. At the very least it's older than I thought and was first reported online in 2006 by WorldNetDaily, a web site known for uncritically passing along stories from around the world.

The rest of the Patheos article, though, can pretty much be summed up as "this has to be a hoax because nobody would ever be that stupid." Sorry, that's a terrible argument. People do stupid things all the time. And while it may be difficult to find official documentation of Kabele and his congregation, I don't know enough about the state of religious record-keeping in Gabon to say whether or not such documents should be expected to exist.

January 2014 - Now On Twitter

For the New Year I've finally gone and set up a Twitter account for my Augoeides and author website posts. I've resisted getting on Twitter for years, but it's quite popular and these days in order to promote books online you pretty much have to be everywhere all at once. So if you're on Twitter go ahead and follow me to receive my latest posts and updates over there as well as on Facebook and Google+.

Augoeides continued to grow in 2013, from 10,022 pageviews per month in January to 12,639 in December. I also had my first semi-viral post in November, which gave me my best month ever at 42,422. This year I also released a new book, Mastering the Great Table, which is the second volume of my Mastering Enochian Magick series. In 2014 I plan to build on last year's success and keep sending stories about magick, spirituality, religion, and the paranormal your way.

I'd like to thank everyone who enjoys my posts for their continued interest and engagement. One of the most rewarding things about blogging is producing articles that resonate with readers and stand out from the sometimes overwhelming chatter of the Internet, and I'm glad that I've been able to do that at least some of the time during the last year. Thank you all very much for your support.

Here's wishing you all a very happy 2014.

The Ancient and Illuminated Seers of Nigeria

I suppose it was inevitable. Scammers from Nigeria have discovered the many ridiculous online ramblings about the "evil Illuminati" and are now spamming accordingly. Recently this message has been showing up all over the Internet, on just about any page that matches the "Illuminati" keyword, including some of my posts here on Augoeides.

Join illuminati - Freemason online today, to meet your demand and acquire wealth, power, protection, influence and a better paying job etc. Also get instant sum of $500,000.00 dollars with a free home anywhere you choose to live in the world $2,500.00 dollars monthly as a salary and other benefit attached. if you are interested contact us now via email: [redacted]@gmail.com or call +234[redacted] for assistance.

The redactions are mine. I'm not going to give these folks extra publicity by including their contact information on the front page of my blog. If you're really interested it's not hard to find by clicking on the following links, but let me stress that I highly recommend you avoid calling or e-mailing them. I did leave the +234 country code from the phone number to identify the country of origin as Nigeria, home of the notorious advance fee scam.

Go Away Cameron!

Back in July I covered the push by David Cameron's government to censor Internet content in the UK, including "esoteric sites." The plan is moving forward, but as it turns out you can't keep a good techie down, especially when it comes to bypassing Internet filters. A new extension for Google's Chrome browser bypasses the filters on adult content and presumably esoteric material as well.

A Chrome browser extension called Go Away Cameron, which can circumvent the "porn filters" being implemented by ISPs, has been launched.

The news comes just a week after BT announced that new customers would have porn filters automatically switched on when customers subscribe to its broadband service. BT and the other major UK ISPs have signed up to the government's campaign to protect children from pornography, which will see 95 percent of houses connected to the Internet having to choose whether to switch on filters by the end of 2014. Sky and TalkTalk have already introduced a filter choice at the point of sign-up and Virgin Media will do the same soon.

The filters have already been shown to be ineffective, since they are letting hardcore material slip through the net while preventing access to sex education, addiction, and women's abuse charity sites, as Wired.co.uk outlined last week.

And, of course, the latter is exactly what groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation warned the UK government about from the start. Every single company that's tried to implement effective Internet filters that (A) filter out objectionable content while (B) leaving educational material and so forth alone has failed. What made them think that they could get it done by simply imposing a mandate on ISP's? The good news is that with this new Chrome extension there's now a solution for the esoteric-minded to avoid having sites they want to read filtered out.

Go Away Cameron can be downloaded here.

Predictions for 2013, Part Two

Continuing our series from yesterday, I will be analyzing the predictions of the remaining five professional psychics whose predictions were quoted in this article. Yesterday's psychics didn't do very well, so we'll see if today's crop is more of the same or if there seem to be some genuine paranormal insights in the mix.

As I commented yesterday, making a living as a professional psychic is very difficult. As a magical practitioner, I'm pretty good at divination and can sometimes not only connect with genuine intuitions but also take advantage of them in my daily life. But magick by its very nature is sometimes quite unreliable. Doing significantly better than chance is certainly possible with training and practice, but most media psychics claim that they truly can see the future to an astonishing degree. And frankly, given my own experiences, I'm fairly certain that without some level of trickery such as cold reading nobody is that good.

I also have noticed that many of the predictions here are simply based on extrapolating trends. Most of the psychics predicted more extreme weather for 2013 just like a lot of climatologists did, but as it turned out 2013 was a milder year than 2012 in terms of significant weather events. Likewise, a number of them predicted various technological advancements, usually the sort of things that could be guessed at by regular readers of publications like Scientific American, Popular Science, and Wired.

Predictions for 2013, Part One

What's that? 2013? Isn't the New Year 2014? Of course it is. This article was actually published last year, with predictions from nine professional psychics for the year that we're now wrapping up. In the interest of science, I thought I would take a few minutes here and see how they did (Spoilers: not very well). I'll cover the first four today and the rest tomorrow to close out the year.

I've often been perceived as rather uncharitable towards professional psychics on this blog. That's not because I don't believe in psychic intuitions, but rather because having experienced them myself I know that it's very difficult getting them to work reliably enough to make a living without resorting to trickery, cold reading, and so forth. A substantial portion of media psychics, such as those mentioned in this article, in fact rely (as we will see) on the method of throwing a whole bunch of outlandish predictions at a wall and hoping some will stick. Then, if they get a hit on something unlikely, the idea is that's what people will remember rather than all of their other spectacular failures.

So let's meet our psychics. I'll start out with their biography, then comment on whether each of their predictions came true. I'll award one point for a correct prediction and half a point for a partial hit, in which something similar but not identical to the prediction took place. Then I'll tally up the total score for each psychic to see who was the most accurate.

The Year in Bigfoot

2013 has been a good year for the sasquatch. Back in February I covered the DeNovo scientific journal, a sham "independent journal" apparently created for the sole purpose of disseminating a paper analyzing supposed bigfoot DNA, and then in July I followed up with the announcement that an independent review of the same purported DNA found that it was in fact opossum DNA mixed with that of another species, raising the possibility of a half-ape, half-possum horror roaming the Pacific Northwest.

The bigfoot DNA story wasn't the only sasquatch news item of the year, either - 2013's sightings attracted more media attention than bigfoot research has in a long time. Huffington Post has a roundup of the various bigfoot stories that made the news this year.

The Bigfoot controversy reared its head (or feet) many times in 2013. The debate surrounding alleged Bigfoot DNA continued from 2012; numerous videos and still images emerged of reported Bigfoots (or is that Bigfeet? We've never really figured that out.); a Texas press conference presented a group of Bigfoot researchers who claimed to show real, never-before-seen high quality videos of the legendary tall, hairy creature; there was also a series of "clear" photos showing two Bigfoot in Pennsylvania.

Back in October I covered new research suggesting that the yeti is not an ape, but rather a species (or subspecies) of bear. In light of this finding, it's worth pointing out that if you draw up a map and put all of the bigfoot sightings on it what you get is a nearly perfect correspondence to the range of the American black bear. Now the videos from British Columbia and the "sleeping bigfoot" look like they might depict real animals - that is, as always, assuming they weren't faked.